Manage subscriptions with ease using the Google Play Subscription Center

At Google IO this year there was a great session on some new Google Play features to make subscriptions and billing operations easier for both users and developers. The announcements here were also followed up by a blog post here on the Android Developers Blog.

Whilst not everyone will be able to make use of all these new features, if you’re providing subscriptions in your applications then you want to make it easy for your customer to be able to manage these. Now, whilst we don’t need to implement this management ourselves, we can pave the path for our users to these screens within the Play Console so that they are able to reach their subscriptions with ease. This not only makes the process simpler for our users, but your support team will also have a more pleasant process when guiding users on how to manage their in-app subscriptions.

This new subscription center will look something like this when opened up in the play store:

This allows our user to easily see the subscriptions that they are currently subscribed to in one place, you can launch this using the URL if you wish to do so from your app:

1

https://play.google.com/store/account/subscriptions

If the play store is installed then launching this URL will take the user to this screen in the play store app. Now, what is even better is the ability to be able to link your user exactly to the page that will show the subscriptions for your app:

If the play store is installed, then this will be used to handle the request. If you accidentally provide an SKU that isn’t found, or if something goes wrong, the play store will handle this for you – so don’t worry about any super weird behaviour occurring:

Linking to the Subscription Center is a straightforward task and allows you to create a more frictionless subscription management for both your users and your team 🙂

I’m an Android Engineer and I love creating beautiful, clean and functional applications that help to make peoples lives easier – I love to be constantly learning and I enjoy writing about Android things / working on open-source projects over on GitHub. I have a bit of a love for Android TV which I sometimes talk about at conferences too! I first found my passion for Android whilst I was at university and have been working with it non-stop since – I find it an amazing platform. I love how it’s constantly evolving, it’s open-ness and the community around it!